Report shows how utilities get their way: Money talks

The outsized political influence that belongs to Florida's four largest utility companies already was Tallahassee's worst-kept secret.

Now it has been laid bare, in excruciating detail, in a report released this week by watchdog group Integrity Florida.

The big take-away?

Florida's four largest power companies — Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy, TECO Energy and Gulf Power — spent more than $18 million on state campaigns and political parties between 2004 and 2012.

On top of that, the companies spent more than $12 million to lobby state government during since 2007. Together they hire about 100 lobbyists each year to influence the 160-member Legislature.

FPL is the biggest spender, writing checks for a third of the lobbying costs and more than 40 percent of the campaign contributions.

What do the companies get out of all of this?

In a word, everything.

Do you see individual fees broken out on your power bill that tell you how much you are paying each month for failed nuclear projects by Duke, formerly Progress Energy? No?

That's because the Legislature voted down a change that would have required that level of detail on bills — something that surely would have invited more customer scrutiny of the companies' spending.

Back in 2006 the Legislature passed a law that gave the utilities a blank check to spend on nuclear projects by collecting the fee from customers.

Lawmakers didn't bother to add a safety net for consumers. No refund provision if the nuclear plants never get built. There's not even a maximum limit on the amount the utilities can collect.

I wonder who came up with that idea?

Just this week the utilities scored another win.

It involved a proposal to let voters decide on a constitutional amendment that would let businesses claim a property-tax exemption if they install solar panels or other renewable energy sources.

But Ritch Workman, R-Melbourne, is chairman of the House Finance and Tax Committee and he doesn't like the idea, so it's effectively dead.

Coincidence that the proposal would have encouraged more businesses to embrace solar power, and perhaps eat into the utilities' market share?

The examples of how these four companies always seem to come out on top in Tallahassee go on and on.

"The issue is how funders are driving the Legislative process more than the public interests," said Dan Krassner, a founder of Integrity Florida and one of the report's authors. "Our Legislature is not broken; it's bought."

Never was that more apparent than in 2010 when the Public Service Commission voted against requests by FPL and then Progress Energy to raise electricity rates.

Later that year four of the five members of the commission who voted against the rate increases were out of a job. The Florida Senate refused to confirm two members who had just been appointed by then-Gov. Charlie Crist and the other two, who applied for new terms, were blocked by a committee of legislators and others.

You'll hear the power companies complain that the Integrity Florida report is biased because it was paid for with a grant from the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

That's a fair point. The Southern Alliance is a decidedly anti-nuclear group that has spoken out against the big utilities in the past.

But the numbers in the report are compiled from public records. There aren't any assertions in the report that can't be traced back to public documents.

Integrity Florida disclosed the grant in the report and on its website.

Only in Tallahassee could a watchdog group that preaches transparency also be the target of calls for transparency.

I asked Krassner for the amount of the grant and he said that wouldn't be available until the nonprofit group files its tax forms later this year.

That's not exactly the kind of more immediate transparency the group wants from the power companies.

Then again, Integrity Florida isn't billing me for a nuclear plant that'll never get built.